We spoke to artist Robyn Phelan about her creative practice and the inspirations behind her work featured in our current exhibition Vessel, Cloth and Cloak, showing at the Australian Tapestry Workshop until the end of July.

How did you get into making art?

As I child (and adult) I had busy hands and a dream-filled head. Straight from high school I did a degree in visual art education, then studied arts management and curation and have worked with young people and artists pursuing creative ideas for decades. Becoming a mother was a major change in my life and I pursued training in ceramics, set up a studio and began making for myself.

Who or what inspires you to create?

I am deeply affected by my surrounding: culturally, environmentally, and atmospherically. I am deeply affected natural environments. These intangible affects are combined with a connection to hand made objects and the stories that can be told from the makers intention, the materials used and the context in which an artefact resides.

What does your practice involve – what techniques do you use in your work?

Ceramics is the foundation of my art practice. The malleable quality of clay offers me the expressive potential to make what I am feeling and researching. I like my resolved work to show the marks of making, the touch of my fingertips and labour of my hands. Ceramics follows quite a rigorous process: making –firing –glazing –firing with plenty of freedom at each of these stages. Recently, I have really enjoyed the immediacy of textile in addition to my ceramics practice. Immediate colour, texture, material response that textile offers is an appealing contrast to clay.
In addition to my material practice is constant drawing, writing (what I call field notes), and cultural research in support of the objects I make. Inevitably and sometimes unconsciously my work will conjure a connection to the history of ceramics.

What does a day in the studio look like?

I turn on the lights in what I affectionately call ‘the bunker,’ drink coffee and reflect on the many different directions I am exploring and then get hands on materials! I have studio days that balance with my work as a lecturer in the School of Art at RMIT University. My making place varies as I self-impose ‘residency’ time where I break from the habitual to be open to new surroundings. This was necessity as a mother of two very energetic kids which has now become a making methodology. I have produced new work in an off-grid studio with a wood fired kiln, in rural locations using trees and river stones, even a hotel at Tullamarine under strict quarantine. Melbourne’s severe lockdown restrictions compressed my practice and teaching into the corner of my lounge room for two years

How does your work in this exhibition relate to your practice and where it is heading?

The Weight of Waiting uses a method of hand pressing into soft clay creating multiple components which can be assembled into a larger form. I devised this new method of making during lockdown when I had precious little clay at home and had been locked out of my studio. The resulting work is based on an ancient amphora, a vessel used throughout the Mediterranean to store grain, water, wine: the sustenance of society. This has been an interesting reconnection to traditional ceramic form as a narrative device: a form that can hold and sustain. During lockdown I raided the ragbag for materials to participate in online workshops and at this time I participated in Tal Fitzpatrick and Kate Just’s @covid19quilt project and Ilka White’s Rag Braiding workshop stitching and cutting up beautifully moth eaten blanket and worn family t-shirts. I’ll be ever grateful for these online experience during deep lockdown. On reflection I had returned to the materials and techniques of my childhood taught to me by mother who was gifted at all forms of practical textiles. Making do and working laterally within strict parameters was forced upon us all in lockdown. A shift to alternate malleable materials such as textile offers immediate colour, texture, and tensile strength which compliments my ceramic practice. That I reuse old clothes and use much smaller quantities of clay benefits my sustainable approach to making that I will to continue working with.

What motivated you to create this piece?

Ceramics is gravity dominant, and I wanted to create a metaphor of the heaviness of lockdown or the burdens we carry embodied in an artwork. In lieu of clay to make ceramics I researched the making of rope, twine, and cordage. I had learnt rolling fibre at a wonderful workshop with the Julianne Gitjpulu from the Maparu Weavers at Ceres Environmental Park in 2019 and thought this might have potential. From Ilka’s workshop I learnt a very simple technique of joining shredded cloth via interloping cut eyelet was a revelation as it enabled me to make a never-ending length of material. Twenty-plus pairs of worn-out jeans later I have a bounty of rope to install my ceramic amphoras. My first pair of shredded jeans were from De Jour jeans in Brunswick that had the bum worn through. I was so fond of the soft faded denim which held so many memories both literally and associatively. I put a call out to my North Melbourne community for second hand jeans and dozens were delivered through my gate (using Covid-safe measures).

The Weight of Waiting recreates sensations of Melbourne's deep lockdown period. Living in an apartment, the artist imagines making containers and ropes to dangle down to the street below (Rapunzel-like) to safely receive medicine, food, from friends and neighbours when isolated with Covid-19. (see image of my journal drawings on this idea)

As I shredded jeans I noticed firstly the weaving qualities of the cotton, then the density and colour of the warp threads that fell as I shredded the jeans into strips to twine. I gathered every fallen thread en masse. As they were gathered, they matted together becoming a strong cultural record of so many stories:

• The universal connections humans have to this particular clothing item,
• The qualities and range of indigo dyed threads and the labour and currency of this industry,
• The evidence of my labour, where a pile of warp threads and a coil of denim rope showed a day had passed.

More on this work here

What are your creative aspirations?

To make work the attracts attention and uncertainty in its familiarity. From an encounter with my work I hope that a viewer might reflect on personal and shared cultural narratives as a way of understanding what it is to be alive in the world today.

‘Vessel, Cloth and Cloak’ is open to the public to view 1-5pm, Tuesday – Saturday until 29 July.

View the ‘Vessel, Cloth and Cloak’ exhibition page here.

'Vessel, Cloth and Cloak' Closing Drinks